The team principal of the Haas F1 Team, Gunther Steiner, has admitted he was surprised by the amount of running the team was able to do during the first pre-season test.
Steiner watched as Romain Grosjean and Esteban Gutierrez rack up a combined 281 over the four days of the first pre-season test at the Circuit de Catalunya, but the amount of issues the team have faced have built up, and knows it is going to be a race against time to be able to solve them all before the second test begins next week.
Grosjean lost time on the first day after a front wing failure, while Gutierrez saw his final day cut short by electronic issues, while other niggles affected the team across the test, but not as many as Steiner was expecting.
“We are pretty happy with progress of testing,” said Steiner. “We didn’t anticipate we could get all this running done this week.
“To do a whole race distance was pretty cool so that gives a good feeling. We would have liked to put a fast lap in at the end but we ran out of time because we had the electronics issues. We expected more problems or to run less.
“The list is pretty long what we have to fix and we are working on it. There are trucks leaving this evening to fix stuff. We have got a solution for most of the problems. It’s just time, it’s the biggest issue to fix it all in time.
“But it’s not like we’re worried about how to fix it. We’re in good shape on that one.”
